The Best Unique Free Stock Photos Websites

Guest Blogger Giulia Guerrero gives us her best and most unique free stock photos websites… you’ll want to save this post trust me I keep coming back to it. Let me know what you think. ~Joli A. Campbell

The world wide web is full of millions of resources. I mean millions upon millions of websites with 48 million results alone for “Free Stock Photos”. With so many places to check, it should be easy to find free quality images to use on your blog, website, or social content, right? Not so much.

If you’ve ever tried searching for free stock photos online, you probably know what a ridiculous and time consuming hassle it can be.

And while free stock photos are the shizzle, they can be extremely difficult to find. Why? Because when you do find some free stock photos, most are low resolution, watermarked, already used pretty much everywhere, and at best, uninspired.

Or if you’re like me, you’re an indecisive photo maniac who simply can’t decide on just any picture for that perfect quote or blog article because, well, it has to speak to you.

So you go through the search engines trying to find something good to end up with the same generic photo of the same guy, in the same mountain, with his back turned to you.

Maybe you bumped into that list of curated free stock photo websites to find that everyone is pretty much listing the same sites and you truly hate having to open 20 new tabs on your browser trying to figure out which of the many mentioned is actually worth your time.

The simple truth is you need a better list of free stock photo websites. And I’ve got you covered.

While I think that for many uses you do need to have paid, high-quality stock photo, in many other cases, the free ones are more than good enough.There are far better things than to spend hours finding the “perfect pic”. ~Giulia Guerrero

Luckily for you, I’ve done most of the work already opening more than 100 tabs just to find the best sites to share with you.

I’ll cover the best sources, along with licensing information and other cool tips to find that image that makes the fit.

The legal part of the free stock photos world:

Licensing is huge when using stock photos, especially if they’re free. Yup, you read that right. Unless you want to get sued by the photo owners, please pay attention to the license issued.

With a lot of free stock photos you can distribute, copy, edit, do absolutely whatever your mind comes up with for both private and commercial use—without asking anyone or giving any attribution.

Any site that offers or mentions free stock photos with CC0 are usually good to go, just make sure to double check your facts.

And avoid, above anything else, using any image that you randomly find that doesn’t explain the license for it. Or any photo that is licensed under CC0, but has a specific logo or brand shown. For example, some photos include Nike or Coca Cola trademarks under a CC0 picture. While the image is free to use, the brands and trademarks are not! So be careful.

A wonderful collection of images from around the world. Initially the site featured only images by Igor Ovsyannykov, but it has expanded to include other photographers.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

Stunning photography by professional photographers, hand-picked for you. This is a small batch of photos, but each has their own use and definitely worth a look.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

A rather amazing collection of images by Daria Nepriakhina. These are great for landing pages and prototypes without looking like you’re a total rookie.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

How many: Hundreds

Tip: Check out the archive for a quick stroll through the images to find what you need faster.

This is a collectors site for a lot of business photos. They’ve curated over 30 high-quality free stock photos websites in one place. Yes, this makes it super easy for you to find images without having to open all those tabs like I did 😉

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

This site also collects images from a bunch of sites like Unsplash, Jay Mantri, and Life Of Pix. The cool part? You can search by color, collection or source, making it super easy for you to find exactly what you need.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

A beautiful project by Vilem Ries. You can browse super-niche categories (called Albums). It’s a place where creators come to find and share beautiful images. I found a lot of images here that I hadn’t seen elsewhere, which is a plus.

Copyrights: Each image has its own CC license. Be sure to read what you can and can’t do.

Take a journey to the east with this Portuguese photographer, who decided every photo should be shared and used free. A lot of the images here are raw, deep and amazingly culture rich.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

A great collection of free stock photos from [FREE: Pexels, Stock Snap, Finda Photo] and [PAID: iStock, Shutter Stock, Dreams Time, Stocksy, Getty and Offset]. If you’re anything like me, sometimes you think an image will work great for your content. Then, you find out, the best parts get cropped out. Bummer! Photype has a “Crop it like it’s hot” tool that lets you see a cropped version of the image before you download. Say, what?!!

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

Starting a business? Tech world? Digital? Then, this is the site for you. You can find a variety of office photos for startups, bloggers, publishers, websites, developers, creators and pretty much whoever.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

Re:Splashed is a side project by Tyler Wanlass. Although this site seems to specialize in a lot of nature, landscape, buildings type images, they do have some great detail shots. And all images are HD.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

Not just a photography site, this site gives you a little bit of all medias: footage, audio, illustrations, and even 3D models. This is a public domain project, so all images are historic. But hey, that’s not a bad thing.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

If you’re looking for options, this one is for you. There are plenty of results for each search and some of the images have great concepts. All images are hi-res and licensed for commercial use = a happy you and me! The only downside I see is that you have to create a FREE account to download the images, but is that really a downside?

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

How many: Thousands, literally

The best of the crop in free stock photography:

These sites, I can’t live without. They’re where I find most of the images I use for my content and of course, these will also be some of the most commonly mentioned in other lists you find online.

A large collection of high-quality images for just about every topic. This site refreshes with 10 new photos every 10 days, so there’s almost always something new to choose from. The blog-style photo organization of the site makes it easy to find what you need. Plus, if you like a photo, you can always click on the photographer’s link to see what else they shared on the site.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

Popular photos from popular sites! I found new and interesting photos here that I couldn’t find in Unsplash or Pixabay. Plus, they have their daily 100 new photos which makes this site a great resource.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

Plenty of options to choose from landscapes to tight, detail shots of buildings, Little Visuals has a good variety for just about any project. The images are sharp and crisp. (Sadly the beautiful images that are on the site will be the only ones loaded as the young man who owned the site died suddenly.)

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

You can definitely find some nice images on Pixabay. And with over 400,000 photos and graphics, it’s one of the biggest collections of free stock photos out there. Just be careful when you click on images, sponsored images can sometimes merge easily with results.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

A wonderful collection of free stock photos for a variety of uses by Ed Gregory. This site started as a weekend project and the quickly turned into a beautiful site with hundreds of images you’ll love. The images are high-quality too, so be free to search it up.

P.S. I had to include the penguin. Too fashion forward and adorable not to share.

Copyrights: CC0 – You agree never to advertise the photo(s) as your own work or portray yourself as the author of said work. Other than that, you’re free to use however you wish for personal or commercial use.

How many: Hundreds

A few last words on free stock photos:

These tools come in very handy whenever you are in need of a photo. You no longer need to hassle with Google or any other search engine trying to find “the one”.

These websites will allow you access to a variety of high-resolution images that can take your visual content to another level.

As you begin to search for images, keep in mind the keywords you use. Sometimes being too literal can result in very little to no images at all. Instead, think of the essence of the content and what type of imagery can help portray your message.

When you do that, your search will be easier and you will find that perfect image faster. Thus, you save time and cut your content creation in half. After all, great visual content doesn’t have to take hours.

Now, I want to hear from you. Do you have know any awesome free stock photo sites we should know about? Share it in the comments.

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About Joli A. Campbell

A WordPress Site designer, writer, blogger, photographer, and artist, in Albuquerque, NM. My business is built around Bringing you Energy Filled Beautiful Websites and Design, specializing in working with women in small business.